Bourgeois thought when it represented
the consciousness of a rising class was materialistic (or dialectical and occasionally
materialistic, as in Hegel), truth‑oriented, and saw, in part at least,
behind the appearances of medieval practices, institutions, and feudal
ideas; it used its knowledge of the reality behind these appearances
to fell the rotting tree of feudal society, a socioeconomic system being undermined
by the growing capitalist mode of production. Truth was on the side of the rising
bourgeoisie and its ideologists; it was an effective weapon.

Once capitalist society arrived
in its full contradictory and alienating actuality, that is, once the bourgeois
ideologists had to defend an existing, ruling system, bourgeois social
thinkers and philosophers made a theoretical practice of dis‑orientation,
of denial of a reality behind the appearances, of mystifying and veiling the
existing relations these same ideologists had unmasked before. But the relations
had changed, they were now the relations of the bourgeois' own society. The
more materialistic and scientific political economy of Adam Smith (1723‑1790)
and David Ricardo (1772‑1823), coinciding with the challenge of the rising
bourgeoisie to feudal power remnants, with the rapid and growing domination
of the capitalist mode of production, was thus metamorphosed into the vulgar
bourgeois, apologetic snake‑dance of the political economy of Marx's and
our own time.

But it is not only to the vulgar
political economist, the apologist of bourgeois society, that the reality behind
the appearances is hidden or obscured. The practical capitalist undergoes
a parallel process, given his practice as a capitalist. And this process extends
even to the mystification of the worker himself!

Karl Marx (1818‑1883)
points out in his unfinished third volume of Capital that, given a particular
rate of exploitation of the workers, the surplus‑value yielded in a given
sphere of production has greater importance for social capital (or for the capitalist
class as a whole) than for a particular capitalist in a specific branch of production.
The particular capitalist cares about this mass of surplus‑value in a
particular sphere of production only in relation to what it does for average
profit. As Marx observes:

But this is a process which
occurs behind his back, one he does not see, nor understand, and which indeed
does not interest him. The actual difference of magnitude between profit and
surplus‑valuenot merely between the rate of profit and the rate
of surplus‑value—in the various spheres of production now completely
conceals the true nature and origin of profit not only from the capitalist,
who has a special interest in deceiving himself (sich zu täuschen)
on this score, but also from the labourer (Arbeiter).The transformation
of values into prices of production serves to obscure the basis for determining
value itself. [1]

Reality, then, would no longer
appear in their theoretical frameworks, and many of the complicated and misleading
appearances, within the system of bourgeois economic distortions and
theoretical lacunae, would be misconceived, conceived by means of a false consciousness,
as "realities".

According to Marx, the later
bourgeois, post‑Ricardian, vulgar economy had been "entrapped"by the existing system of capitalist production‑relations. The bourgeoisie's
vulgar economists felt perfectly at home in their own version of a science of
economics, which quite nicely cohabited with patent absurdities and "perfect
contradictions"; bourgeois relations of production became more and more
intuitively "self‑evident". Thus vulgar bourgeois political
economy "theoretically" nurtured itself in the alienated external
form (entfremdeten Erscheinungsform) of economic relationships. [2]
The apologists of bourgeois economy necessarily chose, then, to abide within
the estranged surface and show of capitalist society, that is, they ceased to
pursue the science of political economy that their revolutionary predecessors
had founded. As Marx describes the alienated scientific appearance of bourgeois
political economy:

Thus, vulgar economy has not
the slightest suspicion that the trinity which it takes as its point of departure,
namely, land‑rent, capital‑interest, labour‑wages or the
price of labour, are prima facie three impossible combinations. First
we have the use‑value land, which has no value, and the exchange‑value
rent: so that a social relation conceived as a thing is made proportional
to Nature, i.e., two incommensurable magnitudes are supposed to stand in a
given ratio to one another. Then capital‑interest. If capital
is conceived as a certain sum of values represented independently by money,
then it is prima facie nonsense to say that a certain value should
be worth more than it is worth. It is precisely in the form: capital‑interest
that all intermediate links are eliminated, and capital is reduced to its
most general formula, which therefore in itself is also inexplicable and absurd.
The vulgar economist prefers the formula capital‑interest, with its
occult quality of making a value unequal to itself, to the formula capital‑profit,
precisely for the reason that this already more nearly approaches actual capitalist
relations. Then again, driven by the disturbing thought that 4 is not 5 and
that 100 taler cannot possibly be 110 taler, he flees from capital as value
to the material substance of capital; to its use‑value as a condition
of production of labour, to machinery, raw materials, etc. . . . . As soon
as the vulgar economist arrives at this incommensurable relation, everything
becomes clear to him, and he no longer feels the need for further thought.
For he has arrived precisely at the "rationale" of the bourgeois
presentation. [3]

The "rationale" of
the bourgeois presentation is to stop before the "boundary" that appearance
has with reality, to shield reality off from these appearances, and to delve
into these same appearances "systematically" in a bourgeois way, i.e.
without connection with the material‑historical realities underlying
capitalist relationships, namely unscientifically.

But it was by now too late to
expect of the bourgeois economists a scientific world‑view, just as today
it would be equally ridiculous to expect of bourgeois philosophers, whether
pragmatists, positivists, phenomenologists, or existentialists, that they themselves
should deal with reality, rather than appearances. Earlier Hegel had probed
as deeply as any bourgeois philosopher could thereafter into the dialectical
reality underlying the appearances, just as Smith and Ricardo had been digging
as deeply as their own bourgeois standpoint would allow, i.e. more deeply than
the subsequent vulgar, bourgeois political economists. In both philosophy and
political economy the surface dominates the apologists' consciousness
more and more. Hegel, Smith, and Ricardo, as representatives of the rising class
brought forth by the new mode of production, were determined to get to the bottom
of things, their foundation; yet they were unable to so fully, because as Marx
explains of their economists:

Classical Political Economy
nearly touches the true relation of things, without, however, consciously
formulating it. This it cannot so long as it sticks in its bourgeois skin.
[4]

The practicing capitalist,
as we have seen earlier, has an objective interest in not penetrating the inner
essence of the capitalist mode of production and, also, an inability to
move towards the essence, both brought on by the process by which he
continues to remain in existence as a capitalist. Marx was the first thinker
able to gain theoretical truth about that essence: that surplus‑value
is transformed by the capitalist into profit. The cost‑price can be
distinguished by the capitalist from the profit, yet the "conception of
value" (Begriff des Werts) naturally eludes the capitalist
here; for he fails to see the total labor objectified in the commodity—he only
sees "total labor" in terms of the means of production (both living
and nonliving means of production). Thereby to the capitalist, profit seems
to lodge in another place than in the commodity itself; furthermore, profit
seems to lodge in another place than in the commodity itself; furthermore,
influences outside the commodity seem to him to have a greater determining role,
because of his own practice of positioning himself in the market and against
his workers so he can effectively fight for profit. [6]
Thus, even when the capitalist class was a rising class, even when its political
economist were materialistic and progressive, they still could not peer more
deeply into the essence of capitalist production‑parts of the essence
could be theoretically conceptualized, but nonetheless the appearances called
forth by this mode of production for the capitalists and their literary representatives
kept Marx's own discovery of the essence from theoretical realization.

Marx was able to probe into
and find this inner connection for the first time, despite the fact that many
economists of genius had been working for many decades to theoretically understand
the foundation of the new system. Those bourgeois theoreticians either conceptualized
the system in forced abstraction from surplus‑value and profit, in order
to retain the determination of value as a basis, or, less theoretically,
as the bourgeois theory of political economy evolved, they shifted to the appearances,
away still further from the essence, by abandoning value as a basis.
These latter theorists, then, fell into the same theoretical cul‑de‑sac
as the practical capitalists, viz. they yielded to the phenomena of competition,
becoming incapable of going beneath them. They could no longer comprehend the
inner essence (innere Wesen)and inner structure (innere Gestalt)behind the appearance (Schein). [7]

Competition as a phenomenon,
Marx had found, cannot show how value is determined. Contrary to the
appearances, value (Wert) dominates the movement of production, since
values lie beneath the prices of production (and ultimately determine them).
To elaborate this Seeming that competition brings forth, Marx gives the
following: (1) average profits are independent of the "organic composition
of capital" (i.e. the relation of the amount of living labor to machinery,
etc.) and the amount of exploitation of workers; (2) fluctuation of prices with
the wage‑level (which seemingly contradicts the deeper connections embodied
in the value relation of commodities); and (3) intricate divergencies
of market price from market value. Marx's discovery, that the essence
of value, to put it simply, is labor‑time (and that surplus‑value
is unpaid labor‑time), [8] is
seemingly contradicted by the phenomena of competition, i.e. the appearances
connected with competition; in fact, perceiving the economy of capitalism from
the viewpoint of competition gives us the appearance of the inverse of
Marx's theory. Competition as the surface of the reality beneath conceals
this inner essence; the phenomena of competition are the inverse (verkehrt)
of the essential patterns giving them birth. [9]

A superficial, class‑bounded
look at bourgeois society shows us the worker's wage as labor's price. Some
interpret this as the "value of labor", with an expression of its
"necessary or natural price" in money terms. At the same time they
speak of the "market‑price" of labor, which fluctuates above
and below its "natural price". [10]
But, in reality, labor has no value. As Marx asserts:

In the expression "value
of labour," the Value concept (Wertbegriff) is not only completely
obliterated, but actually inverted (verkehrt). It is an expression
as imaginary as the value of the earth. These imaginary expressions, arise,
however, from the relations of production themselves. They are categories
for the outer forms (Erscheinungsformen) of essential relations (wesentlicher
Verhältnisse). That in their appearance (Erscheinung) things
often represent themselves in inverted form (verkehrt) is pretty well
known in every science except Political Economy. [11]

For Marx, then, and for social
science as well, the appearance/reality distinction is indispensable. The essence
manifests itself (partly at least) in its appearances, reality must appear in
a certain form; the appearances are not unreal but are the appearances of the
essence, the appearance of reality. Nonetheless, the appearances must not be
taken, undialectically, unscientifically, for the reality (essence) itself.
As the ancient Ionian philosopher Heraclitus (ca. 540‑475 B.C.) had said:
"The underlying harmony is stronger than the apparent one." [12]
Both Hegel and Marx, as dialecticians, based their own distinction of appearance/reality
upon Heraclitus; and science in general, despite pervasive positivistic obscurantism,
[13] must agree with Heraclitus when he
observed: "The inner essence is disposed to hide itself.” [14]

The appearance/reality distinction,
of course, did not spring up from social science, but was generated from the
needs of physical science, originally. As Albert Einstein (1879‑1955)
stated in his inaugural address to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1914:

. . . As long as no principles
are found on which to base the deduction, the individual empirical fact is
of no use to the theorist; indeed he cannot even do anything with isolated
general laws abstracted from experience. He will remain helpless in the face
of separate results of empirical research, until principles which he can make
the basis of deductive reasoning have revealed themselves to him. [15]

And Einstein added, humbly,
the following, on the basis of this essence/appearance distinction, in regard
to the present unknowns in theoretical science:

. . . It may equally well
happen that clearly formulated principles lead to conclusions which fall entirely,
or almost entirely, outside the sphere of reality at present accessible to
our experience. In that case it may need many years of empirical research
to ascertain whether the theoretical principles correspond with reality. We
have an instance of this in the theory of relativity. [16]

Einstein was also wise and practical
enough to know that reality must appear,that scientific concepts
to be true must conform to and explain the laws of these appearances: "Kepler's
marvelous achievement is a particularly fine example of the truth that knowledge
cannot spring from experience alone but only from the comparison of the inventions
of the intellect with observed fact." [17]
Despite Einstein's ahistoric view, that scientific theories are "free creations"
of the mind, the theories approximately reveal the underlying reality, for him.

Though Kant (1724‑1804)
made the reality behind the appearances unknowable, [18]he made the existence of things in themselves thinkable. As Kant
says: ". . otherwise we should be landed in the absurd conclusion that
there can be appearance (Erscheinung) without anything that appears."
[19] Or as Kant put it in his Prolegomena
(1783):

The sensuous world is nothing
but a chain of appearances connected according to universal laws; it has therefore
no subsistence by itself, it is not the thing in itself, and consequently
must point to that which contains the basis of this appearances (Grund
dieser Erscheinung),to beings which cannot be known merely as
appearances, but as things in themselves. In the knowledge of them alone can
reason hope to satisfy its desire for completeness in proceeding from the
conditioned to its conditions. [20]

Kant makes plain what his Critique
is out to smash, viz. materialism, fatalism, atheism, free‑thinking, fanaticism,
superstition. [21] And the unknowability
of reality has this motivation for Kant; as he says: "I must, therefore,
abolish (aufheben) Knowledge in order to make a place for Faith (Glauben)
. . . ." [22]

In order to make room for faith,
Kant developed a constitutive idealismof the appearances, such that
the whole world of Nature (phenomena) were mere appearances, i.e. only
modifications of our sensuous intuition, without any categorical connection
to transcendental objects. [23] As Kant
declares: nature is not a thing in itself but is merely an aggregate of appearances
. . . " [24] And further:

Thus the order and regularity
in the appearances (Erscheinungen), which we entitle nature (Natur),
we ourselves introduce. We could never find them in appearances, had not we
ourselves, or the nature of our mind, originally set them there. [25]

The full anti‑materialist
and transcendental idealistic flavor of Kant's outlook comes forth when
he asserts:

External objects (bodiesKörper)
. . . are mere appearances, and are therefore nothing but a species of my
representations (Vorstellungen), the objects of which are something
only through these representations. Apart from them they are nothing. [26]

Given Kant's theory that the
structure of Nature (the world of phenomena) and external bodies are projected
by the make‑up of our minds, and thus appearances are perfectly cognizable
(along with their laws), the thinker can never come into contact with Dinge
an sich,things in themselves, only with appearances; but Kant declares
we do not really need to know noumena (things as they really are),
since nothing can be presented to me except as a phenomenon. [27]

Hegel (1770‑1831) was
not content to seal reality off from the cognitive powers of the human mind,
nor was he willing to jettison the appearance/reality dialectic, as in the case
of so many thinkers of the post‑Kantian, bourgeois era. Hegel points out
that Transcendental Idealism's development after Kant (Fichte, Schelling) "recognized
the nothingness of the spectral thing‑in‑itself", which as
an "abstract shadow divorced from all content". [28] Even Kant must admit the complete divorce from content of his Ding an
sich:

If we are pleased to name
this object noumenon for the reason that its representation is not sensible,
we are free to do so. But since we can apply to it none of the concepts of
our understanding, the representation remains for us empty, and is of no service
except to mark the limits of our sensible knowledge and to leave open a space
which we can fill neither through possible experience nor through pure understanding.
[29]

Such things in themselves (as
unknowable), Hegel points out, are merely abstractions from the interconnectedness
of things with one another, thoughts devoid of all determination.
Because, conceptually, the thing in itself is thus set equal to zero, of course,
it becomes unknowable. Kant's "thing in itself" (as incomprehensible)
is like Schelling's "Absolute" of which nothing ultimately can be
said except in "it" all is one. [30]
Being must be mediated, must have determinations,therefore
must be knowable, must appear, for Hegel. Unlike Kant, Hegel knows that there
is a becoming of essence (Werden Des Wesens).

Just as in Marx later, Hegel
states: “. . . the world in and for itself is the inversion (die verkehrte)of the manifested (erscheinenden) world.” [31] Marx's account of the Show of competition also involved inverting the
essential relationships, and Hegel sees, like Marx, that, although seeming (Schein)
hides these essential relationships, seeming itself is the seeming of
essence, essence's seeming. As Hegel states:

Essence (Wesen) is, however,
that sublated Being (aufgehobene Seyn) developed; it is only Seeming (Schein)
which stands over against it. But Seeming is the . . . positing (Setzen)
of Essence. [32]

As Hegel explains at his dialectical best:

These two moments, namely
the nothingness (Nichtigkeit) which yet is and the being which is only
a moment, or the implicit negativity and the reflected immediacy that constitute
the moments of essence itself: it is not a seeming (Schein)
ofbeing in the essence, or a seeming of essence in being,
the seeming in the essence (Wesen) isnot the seeming of another,
but rather it is seeming in itself, the Seeming of the Essence itself.
[33]

Whereas Kant stopped at contradiction,
Kant being paralyzed by its omnipresence where thought was concerned, Hegel
presses forward to the recognition of the profound truth of contradiction, [35]
and thus Hegel is not trapped with an incognizable essence and a perfectly
cognizable appearance, as in Kant; since, for Hegel, reality can only present
itself by means of contradictory oppositions, such as the opposition
appearance/reality. [36] The being that
appears and its essence must stand in relation to one another; their
essential relation is Existence (Existenz): " . . what appears
manifests what is essential and this is in its Appearance." [37]
When certain conditions obtain, there are existential facts which emerge; but
such facts are tied to their essences and have being before they actually
exist—they must unfold. [38] "DasWesen muss erscheinen." [39]
The Essence must appear. Essence passes into existence: ". . . Existence
is essence's absolute emptying of itself or self·alienation (Entäusserung),
nor has it remained behind on the further side of it." [40]

Finally, as in Marx, Hegel states
(though with a mystical motive): "Abstract thinking . . . is not to be
regarded as a mere setting aside of the sensuous material (sinnlichen Stoffes),
the reality of which is not thereby impaired; rather is it the sublating and
reduction (Aufheben und die Reduktion) of that material as mere Appearance
(Erscheinung) to the Essential (Wesentliche), which is manifested
only in the Concept (Begriff)." [41]

In Hegel's Germany the bourgeoisie
was not in power, but had to be content with a secondary, sycophantic relationship
to the rotting system of the feudal nobles and kings there; yet the German bourgeoisie
still had their eyes on the citadels of power, which their cousins in England
and France were closer to, and thus Hegel's thought represented a rising, though
timid bourgeoisie. This rising class wished to lift the veil of appearance and
gaze at the essence. The deep social and economic contradictions of that German
world made the conceptualization of dialectics necessary for the literary representatives
of the rising class. Marx radically transformed Hegelian dialectics for the
use of science, materialism, and the new class that had recently arrived
on the historical stage, the proletariat.

When the bourgeoisie achieved
power in France, England, and the United States, it needed a philosophy which
would express its new practice of rule, a practice which included a rapidly
growing internal economy—in between mammoth depressions—and a vigorous and an
aggressive policy towards grabbing the lands and wealth of other peoples. Especially
in England and the United States, the new philosophy was Neo‑Hegelianism.
Neo‑Hegelianism's "Absolute Mind" gave its devotees that oceanic
feeling, stressed growth, completeness transcending space and time, and was
a secular bourgeois substitute for feudalistic and obsolescent religiosity.
Philosophy could soar beyond time and space, and it could commune with the new
gods of the earth making for "progress", the colonialists, world‑ranging
merchants, mechanical inventors, and arrogant missionaries with a "world
mission". Capitalism was on the verge of imperialism, yet all seemed rational,
cosmically necessary. When capitalism did reach the stage of imperialism, that
is, when there was no longer any room for the colonial powers to "grow"
except by "growing" at the expense of other colonial powers, Neo‑Hegelianism
or Absolute Idealism had reached the stage of being aufgehoben; it had
to be sublated, and it was. American Absolute Idealism had represented expansiveness,
guaranteed salvation sub specie aeternitatis, being able to grasp the
totality, i.e. rising above both the immediate and the particular, and,
above all, rising above to the totality by means of rationality. But
by the 1890's and the years before the Great Imperialist World War of 1914,
the imperialist powers were hemmed in by one another, emphasis shifted to the
immediate, to the particular. The economy and the society didn't
seem to be working—a new bourgeois outlook, corresponding to the new capitalist
practice, was needed in the youngest and most vital imperialist power, a philosophy
which would make a full break with the feudal past's religion and outlook, especially
with its rationality, and with that substituting bourgeois expediency and "workability"
for truth.

Josiah Royce (1855‑1916)
stood forth as the greatest representative in America of this Neo‑Hegelianism.
He had come from the frontier and avidly, reworked the products of the
great stream of philosophers from Germany. His colleague William James (1842‑1910)
devoted his life to destroying Royce's Absolute Idealism, as well as its British
philosophical cousin. James was intent on developing a new outlook, Pragmatism.

What had previously been a progressive,
semi‑worldly outlook in Emerson, had become an anachronistic, almost other‑worldly
creed in Royce. Absolute Idealism in the pre‑Civil War period fought for
the abolition of slavery and for human liberty. (Nonetheless, it was still a
philosophy of mystification, since it was still an idealism, a philosophy fighting
against materialism and science. But its main function was to create a more
rational, a more developed capitalist system.) But the march of science had
irretrievably damaged the older idealism, so a new idealism, not going by that
name, in fact claiming to go beyond it, was needed. Moreover, the new
milieu of imperialism had such sharp and inexhaustible contradictions connected
with it, both domestically and abroad, that the concept of a fully rational
universe was no longer either a proper fighting creed nor a useful notion to
serve for the purpose of mystifying the people, that is, for protecting the
now profoundly uneasy power of the ruling capitalist class, because
the world no longer seemed so rational, nor would any "Absolute"
magically account for or cancel out such sharply contrasting appearances. In
other words, the proper philosophy for the period of imperialism in America,
in order to serve effectively as a mystification of the masses and to serve
as a fighting weapon of the American bourgeoisie, would have to be irrational.
Nowhere else in the imperialist world did the ruling capitalist class make
such a "good" decision on choice of philosophy; its choice of pragmatism
was probably the closest to real bourgeois needs.

Pragmatism, in James' conception
at least (and this conception of pragmatism is still the most deeply rooted
in the consciousness of Americans, notwithstanding Dewey, C. I. Lewis, Hook,
and Quine), was both irrational and mystified, yet claimed also to be scientific!
It was not only "scientific" but religious to boot! Immediacy, sensuousness,
experience, and particularity would replace the dramatic, conspicuous
absence of the Absolute Mind. As James stated in 1904:

My description of things starts
with the parts [nota bene] and makes of the whole a being of the second order.
It is essentially a mosaic philosophy of plural facts, like that of Hume and
his descendants, who refer these facts neither to Substances in which they
inhere nor to an Absolute Mind that creates them as its objects. [42]

We notice here a rejection both
of materialism, that is, of a material reality giving rise to the appearances,
and of Absolute Idealism. Moreover, only the parts are really real, a nominalist
antithesis to Absolute Idealism's denial of the ontological ultimacy
of the "parts", i.e. the appearances. Bourgeois thought, then, falls
back upon the skeptical conservatism of David Hume's philosophy, with some new
bourgeois twists and additions. Thus only the experienceable surface of reality
is granted ontological status, and this surface is nominalistically conceived.
It is also fitting that James selects the term "mosaic" as his metaphor
to describe his conception.

But what about the powers and
forces behind these appearances? This question always comes back to haunt
the phenomenalist. Due to the fact that James requires all proposed realities
to be directly experienceable, he must then try to make the connections and
determinations of the appearances themselves appearances, sensuously
apparent. Hence James is convinced that he is far more "radical" than
Hume, since James grants that the set of "conjunctions" ("conjunctive
relations"), the glue that holds things together, is there for us
to perceive, instead of Hume's loose, glueless phantasmagoria of disconnected
impressions. [43] But James' conception
of the universe is not really that far removed from Hume's; James not only does
not want reality and its essential relations to stand behind the appearances
but he also does not want too much glue to reside on the surface of the mosaic.
As James explains:

Taken as it does appear, our
universe is to a large extent chaotic. No one single type of connection runs
through all the experiences that compose it. [44]

The "chaos" James
is speaking about, however, is a function of physical laws on the cosmic level
and of socio‑economic laws on the socio‑historical level, both sets
of laws not apparent on the phenomenal level. The "chaotic" condition
of human affairs in James' time was largely the manifestation of the
inner workings of imperialism, as James himself sometimes realized. But
James and the bourgeoisie could not plumb the depths under the "chaos",
otherwise they would have had to surrender ideological hegemony to the proletariat
and its theorists. The chaos would have to be taken as ultimate ontologically,
reality would be identified solely with seeming. As James explained,
parallel to Ernst Mach's subjectivism, in James' famous essay of 1904, "Does
'Consciousness' Exist?": "My thesis is that if we start with the supposition
that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which
everything [nota bene] is composed, and if we call that stuff 'pure experience,'
then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards
one another into which portions of pure experience may enter.” [45]

Even James' own pragmatism,
he himself asserted in 1907, was not logically connected with his "radical
empiricism". [46] James' philosophy
itself was a scene of chaos, but a "chaos" with an underlying unity:
bourgeois thought had to move to emphasize immediacy, one could no longer conceptualize
the totality or the essential relationships giving rise to the forms of appearance.
The bourgeoisie was now a declining ruling class and no longer had an interest
in either reality or truth, yet pragmatism would give the capitalists and their
ideologists the needed flexibility and techniques to control their
system and the masses to a certain extent, and, since it would turn the bourgeois
away from the reality behind the appearances, pragmatism would allow its devotees
to engage in their own self‑deception. Let us see how James himself works
this "flexible" perspective out in his pragmatic notion of "truth":

Our account of truth is an
account of truths in the plural, of processes of leading, realized in rebus,
and having only this quality in common, that they pay. . . .
Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification·processes,
just as health, wealth, strength, etc., are names for other processes connected
with life, and also pursued because it pays to pursue them. Truth is made,
just as health, wealth and strength are made, in the course of experience.
[47]

The metaphor of "paying"
is, of course, a perfect one for a bourgeois philosopher. Like Marxism before
it, Pragmatism does link up with life; they both emphasize practice, but
Pragmatism allows (for James) anything that fits psychologically into
our individual lives to "pay", [48]
whereas Marxism sees theory and practice as dialectically interpenetrating,
that is, theory and practice illuminate one another. Practice, in Marxism, does
not make theory subservient to inner psychological needs. Practice is the proof
(or disproof) that theory has gone beyond the surface of things, that objective
truth has been sighted, or better conceptualized, though Marxism already (before
Pragmatism's bourgeois birth) knew, contrary to Feuerbach and the mechanistic
materialists, that much of the objective truth of the reality around us has
been brought about by the subject, i.e. human beings, by their revolutionary
practice. Something is true, nonetheless, even if a subjective idealist such
as James might not feel it "paid" for him!

As James sketched the orientation
that the "pragmatic method" gives: "The attitude of looking
away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and
of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts." [49]
"Looking away", of course, James forgot, does not remove the reality
behind the appearance. Scientists cannot indulge in "looking away"
from "first things", with the exception of bourgeois social scientists.
Thus James does not disappoint our expectation, he feels quite comfortable in
teaming up with George Berkeley (1685‑1753), agreeing with Berkeley's
rejection of material substance behind our sensations. [50]

James' philosophy was designed
to link up with life. But the new philosophy of Edmund Husserl (1859‑1938),
that is, "Phenomenology", which was formulated shortly before World
War I, in Germany, strained every philosophical and methodological muscle to
detach itself from existence, to enable Husserl to develop a "permanent"
and an "indubitable" foundation for science and culture. That "foundation"
would be steeped in Spirit, in a Transcendental Idealism, a foundation which
would fight eternally against materialism (Naturalismus). Husserl's
phenomenology was announced in 1913 in his book Ideas: General Introduction
to Pure Phenomenology (Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und
phänomenologischen Philosophie). And as Husserl stated in the preface
to the English edition in 1931: "The result of the phenomenological clarification
of the meaning of the manner of existence of the real world . . . is that only
transcendental subjectivity has ontologically the meaning of Absolute Being,
that it only is non‑relative, that is relative only to itself; whereas
the real world indeed exists, but in respect of essence is relative to transcendental
subjectivity, and in such a way that it can have its meaning as existing . .
. reality only as the intentional meaning‑product of transcendental subjectivity."
[51] Within the text of his book of 1913,
Husserl continued the tradition of constitutive idealism of such Neo‑Kantians
as Hermann Cohen (1842‑1918) and Paul Natorp (1854‑1924), which
Neo‑Kantians had thrown out Kant's own Dingan sich, that
is, the reality behind the appearances, and thus Cohen and Natorp had followed
the general bourgeois trend towards immediacy and allowing the appearances no
ontological support except the spiritual action of Mind. As Husserl asserts:
"An object that has being in itself. . . is never such as to be out
of relation to consciousness and its Ego." [52]
Furthermore, Husserl's own brand of Idealism has the wild, egotistic outcome,
that even if the world of Nature disappeared, though the Being of consciousness
would be "affected", that "Being" would still exist (!)
and its essential functioning would remain in place! Marx and Engels were able
to explain the roots of such speculative idealism and the idealistic
rejection of the primacy of Nature and existing human practice:

Division of labour only becomes
truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labour appears.
From this moment onwards consciousness can really flatter itself that
it is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really
represents something without representing something real; from now on
consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to
proceed to the formation of "pure" theory, theology, philosophy,
morality, etc. [53]

Marx and Engels explain the
trap that idealistic philosophers such as Husserl fall into in terms of the
process of ideology (false, distorted consciousness), in which the true
relations of reality and mind become inverted, perverted, turned upside down.
To cite the actual quotation from Husserl referred to above in paraphrase: ".
. . The Being of consciousness, of every stream of experience (Erlebniisstromes)
generally, [54]though it would indeed
be inevitably modified by a nullifying (Vernichtung) of the thing‑world,
would not be affected thereby in its own proper existence.” [55]

Husserl fell into this wild
Transcendental Idealism despite his great teacher's warnings about going off
the deep end. Franz Brentano (1838‑1917), Husserl's Viennese teacher,
however, himself gave Husserl many of the scholastic philosophical categories
and concepts that would aid Husserl in holding out against materialism and the
growth of modem science. Husserl's German academic world was a professorial‑bureaucratic
world, in which Husserl could insulate himself from the hurly‑burly of
life, at least until the Nazis came to power in 1933. In German philosophy,
despite wide idealistic differences, the main enemy was materialism, and a direct
attack on irrational religion and society was largely impossible. But the real
battles and most important dimension of life for such ideologist‑philosophers
were those of clashing philosophical schools, competition between various idealisms
and idealistic methodologies. Since such philosophers were not linked up with
the extra‑academic world, the greatest threat to their ideological fantasies
and school‑empires was the impact of the rapidly growing sciences whose
main danger to idealism was the constant tendency towards materialistic conclusions,
in other words, conclusions which went against the ideological inversion
which had the peril of inverting the inversion. As Marx and Engels described
in outline this process of the ideological inversion:

Men are the producers of their
conceptions, ideas, etc., that is, real, active men, as they are conditioned
by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse
corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never
be anything else than conscious being, and the being of men is their actual
life‑process. If in all ideology men and their relations appear upside‑down
(auf den Kopf gestellt) as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon
arises just as much from their historical life‑process as the inversion
of objects on the retina does from their physical life‑process. [56]

Husserl, of course, carries
this ideological inversion as far as it can be carried when he says: ".
. .Consciousness, considered in its 'purity', must be reckoned as a
self‑contained system of Being, as a system of Absolute Being,
into which nothing can penetrate, and from which nothing can escape. . .
." [57] Despite this phenomenological
disconnection from actual material and earthly life, Husserl, like James, proceeds
to reduplicate empiricism, positivism, and immediacy on the transcendental
level, as well as on the sensuous intuitive plane.

The phenomenology of Husserl
is a study of "phenomena", not the reality of a material world behind
them. What is different here from more profane, impure types of empiricism or
positivism is that Husserl's "phenomena" are not considered from the
point of view of their existence. Phenomenology purifies itself of this
vast philosophical impurity of natural existence by means of the phenomenological
reduction, the epoché. What is gained in this purified region
"outside" of existence is a new point of view, one which can be seen
to contrast at every point with the (normal) natural outlook. Husserl, after
existence has been placed in "brackets" by means of the epoché,
then concentrates on the eidos, the essence of all kinds of presentation,
sensuous, conceptual, imaginative, fantastic types. Phenomenology thus aims
at a knowledge of essences (Wesenerkenntnisse), it deals not with the
real but with the "irreal". [58]
Scholasticism of a new subjectivistic kind thus re‑entered the
philosophical mainstream of Idealism, reflecting the imperfectly realized bourgeois
society of Germany, which was still dominated by strong feudalistic‑bureaucratic
elements. [59]

Just as each positive science
has its own domain, Husserl tells us, and its own rational justifications of
its assertions on the basis of "originary" (originärer) given
objects of intuition, e.g. the originary experience of physical things in physical
science; thus does phenomenology have its own objects and "originary experience".
As Husserl declares:

The essence (Eidos) is
an object of a new type. Just as the datum of individual or empirical intuition
is an individual object, so the datum of essential intuition is a pure essence.
[60]

Thereby Husserl does battle
with both naturalistic and positivistic empiricism, not by the old rationalism,
but by his new transcendental subjectivistic "empiricism" made possible
by the phenomenological [epoché], whereby essences are "freed"
from all questions of existence, thereby purified and made available "on
a basis of immediacy" (unmittelbaren Feststellung). [61]
Husserl sees the growing popularity of philosophical empiricism as a function
of the continuing advance of science, but he warns that even greater breakthroughs
of the positive sciences require further breakthroughs in insight into Essential
Being; therefore, the empiricist hostility to ideas (Ideenfeindschaft) must
be successfully combatted. [62] Instead
of Husserl seeing that empiricism of either the naturalistic or positivistic
variety remains only on the surface of things, instead of perceiving that theoretical
investigation requires digging into the reality behind the appearances, behind
the immediately intuited, Husserl constructs a new one‑sided empiricism,
a new ultimate set of intuitions, "seeing in general". Phenomenological,
radical "seeing" has its own given objects which can be seen in an
"originary" way. As Husserl insists:

If we see an object standing
out in complete clearness, if purely on the basis of the seeing, . . . if
then we see (as a new way of "seeing") how the object is constituted,
the statement faithfully expressing this has then its justification. If we
ask why the statement is justified, and ascribe no value to the reply "I
see that it is so", we fall into absurdity . . . . [63]

This statement of Husserl's
is reminiscent of James' own criterion of evidence in his philosophy
of Radical Empiricism. As James says: "To be radical, an empiricism must
neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced,
nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced." [64]

Husserl formulates his own "principle
of all principles" not in terms of a Praxis critically evaluating
"seeing" and theories of various sorts but in terms of "originary
given intuition" (originär gebende Anschauung), [65]
and thus parts company with Classical German Idealism which had seen that the
categories we approach the immediate with mediate immediacy, i.e. they
make what is "seen" intelligible. Husserl returns to a passive
revelation of complete Being and truth. But even a muddy idealist such as
A. N. Whitehead (1861‑1947) knew better. As he asserted:

Theories are built upon facts;
and conversely the reports upon facts are shot through and through with theoretical
interpretation . . . . . . . Contemporary evidence is contemporary interpretation,
including the assumption of data other than these bare sensa. [66]

Even the anti‑Marxist
and pseudo‑dialectical theoretician of the Frankfurt School Theodor Adorno
(1903‑1969) saw through the shallowness of bourgeois philosophies of immediacy
such as Husserl's, when Adorno wisely observed:

The confidence that from immediacy,
from the solid and downright primary, an unbroken entirety will spring—this
confidence is an idealistic chimera. To dialectics, immediacy does not maintain
its immediate pose. Instead of becoming the ground, it becomes a moment. [67]

In both the thought of James
and Husserl theory and science are reduced to immediacy, all mediations and
constructions of theories are one‑sidedly neglected, and bourgeois philosophy
continues its reckless and anti‑human course of disorientation by assuming
that immediacies float around as things which are complete in themselves, like
ripe peaches ready to be picked. Husserl not only leaves out the need of theory
to probe into and beyond immediacy, but he leaves out the other pole of this
dialectic, namely Praxis. As Marx says in his Second Thesis on Feuerbach:

Man must prove the truth,
i.e., the reality and power, the this‑worldliness (Diesseitigkeit)
of his thinking in practice (Praxis). The dispute over the reality
or non‑reality of thinking which isolates itself from practice is a
purely scholastic question. [68]

But Husserl persists with inverted (ideological)
thought when he states:

Thus the meaning which "Being"
bears in common speech is precisely inverted (kehrt um). . . . . Reality,
that of the thing taken singly as also that of the whole world, essentially
lacks independence. . . . . Reality is not in itself something absolute, binding
itself to another only in a secondary way, it is, absolutely speaking, nothing
at an, it has no "absolute essence" whatsoever, it has the essentiality
of something which in principle is only intentional, only known,
consciously presented as an appearance. [69]

As Marvin Farber says of all
this nonsense: "Husserl had lived alone too much, had practiced his unchallenged
monologue too long, and had combed over his self‑consciousness to such
an extent, that to him the term 'everything' came to mean only the set of correlates
of his consciousness.” [70] And as Farber
says further: ". . . Husserl never 'inspected' himself with respect to
his actual economic, social, and political place in German society, either under
the monarchy, to which he later looked back with regret at its passing, or under
the Weimar republic." [71] We must
add even "essences" must be probed beneath the immediacies with which
concepts present themselves. Truth is there, but not in pristine nakedness to
a passive intellectual consciousness.

The logical positivist and phenomenalist
A. J. Ayer (b. 1910) did to some extent at least engage in political and social
life, [72] without purposefully having it
fertilize his thin, apparently anti‑metaphysical philosophy. Ayer was
in the British Army when he published his defense of phenomenalism in
1940, while the Second World War was in its early stage of catastrophic carnage!
Earlier in 1936, during the Nazi era, Ayer had taken the position that ethical
and political philosophy was "meaningless', [73]
thus putting Nazi, liberal, and Marxist ethical systems all on the same irrational‑emotional
level. In his book defending phenomenalism, [74]
he begins on a scholastic note of conventionalism:

. . . I have shown that between
a philosopher who says that he sees only sense‑data and one who says
that he sees material things there is no disagreement about any matter of
fact. If they appeal to the facts at all it can be only to show that one form
of expression is more convenient [nota bene] than the other. Thus, the sense
in which my experience gives me justification for saying that I see only sense‑data
in quite different from the sense in which it gives me justification for saying
that I see only Bank of England notes. [75]

The good bourgeois philosopher,
of course, knows when a British five pound note is in his hand, though
he remains doubtful about the relative "convenience" of the material‑object
"language"! Ayer's conventionalism deepens later in his book:

There is, indeed, a sense
in which it is correct to say that both sense‑data and material things
exist, inasmuch as sentences that are used to describe sense‑data and
sentences that are used to describe material things both very frequently express
true propositions [true in relation to what?]. But is would not be correct
to infer from this that there really were both material things and sense‑data,
in the sense in which it can truly be said that there really are chairs as
well as tables. . . . [76]

The phenomenalistic nearby objects
of Ayer's professorial world, then, take ontological precedence over material
reality, of which these objects are also a small part.

With Ayer's phenomenalism, the
sense‑data language will make no distinction "between things as they
appear and things as they really are". [77]
Ayer adds that this philosophical move would neither throw us into self‑contradiction
nor would it negate the concept of a veridical perception. But he hastens to
observe: "It is true, indeed, that if we abolished the distinction that
we ordinarily make between appearance and reality, and at the same time refused
to introduce any compensatory conventions [conventions again!], we should be
involved in self‑contradiction." [78]
Therefore Ayer must develop a phenomenalistic interpretation of the concept
of a veridical perception; if this proves to be either logically impossible,
or even less "convenient" than the retention of the appearance/reality
dialectic, then Ayer's phenomenalistic convention of "veridicity"
would be propelled towards "self‑contradiction", or to the very
opposite of convenience, to say the least.

But if every object perceived
is but appearance, if there is no reality issuing into these appearances, what
sense could logically be given to a veridical "appearance" as opposed
to a "non‑veridical" appearance? Precisely on this question
of judging the convenience of a phenomenalistic approach, Ayer is able to see
self‑contradiction in the concepts of Rudolf Carnap (1891‑1970).
Carnap tried to avoid the problem of the egocentric predicament by stating that
the "problem" does not come up if it is expressed in formal terminologyeverything
is attempted to be avoided by formal terminology in Carnap, it seems. Yet Ayer
sees through this formalistic seeming easily:

But in this instance his [Camap's]
predilection for the formal terminology has led him into confusion. His argument
rests . . . upon the assumption that if the sentences of the protocol language
referred, not to physical events, but to the contents of experiences, it would
follow, in view of the privacy of personal experience, that each person would
have his own private protocol language which could have no meaning for anybody
else. [79]

Ayer does not see that he falls
into the same difficulties by retaining any kind of phenomenalism. For
if Ayer is attempting to express material object statements by sense data, the
problem of the uniqueness of each ego's own sensa makes this impossible.
Ayer again must fall back on convention, i.e. relatively similar meanings of
reports of similar sensa. [80] Like Carnap's,
Ayer's phenomenalistic idealism places him in an inextricable solipsism, in
a privatized world of "correlating" sense experiences, all the talk
of "conventions" and "formal terminology" in both Ayer and
Carnap notwithstanding.

Our shining phenomenalist knight,
A. J. Ayer, comes, in appearance, to the rescue quickly to save us from the
need of bringing back the concept of reality. "What we actually do is to
define the real qualities of a material thing in terms of the qualities of certain
privileged appearances." [81] Thus
Saint Alfred is able to save the concept of veridicity for phenomenalism, to
"define" the real in terms of "certain privileged appearances".
There is nothing like privilege in "égalitarian", open, bourgeois
society. Aren't the concepts of "privilege" or "privileged appearances"
rather arbitrary? No, says Ayer. As he states, flexibly, of his "privileged
appearances": "The choice of the preferential conditions may not be
the same for every kind of material thing; but it will be governed by the general
rule of giving preference to the sense‑data that are the most reliable.
. . . [82] But even if the concept of "privileged
appearances" were arbitrary, our fearless knight of the realm of
appearances, A. J. Ayer, tells us, this would not condemn the phenomenalist
position to self‑contradiction, real or phenomenal:

But even if the procedure
were arbitrary, which it is not, there would still be no ground for saying
that it led to any contradictions. There is no logical reason why, in classifying
appearances as veridical or delusive, we should have to include them all in
the same category. [83]

Apparently, then, in the ever‑so‑unlikely
case that Ayer's "privileged appearances" were found to be arbitrary,
arbitrariness itself is not contradictory nor would it lead to self·contradiction.
Would arbitrariness make the phenomenalistic language even more "convenient"?
[84]

To show that he is not a Berkeleyan
idealist, Ayer proceeds to refute Berkeley's esse is percipi argument
against material things, and then Ayer adopts the phenomenalistic idealism of
John Stuart Mill (1803‑1873). [85]
Furthermore, Ayer adopts the convention is his sense‑data approach
that "whatever appears is real.” [86]
It is unusual for a positivist to speak of something being "real",
but Ayer does not deviate from normal positivism on the question of causation
as necessary connection, a concept he rejects. Like Hume before him,
Ayer only sees correlations. Ayer's sense‑datum approach was supposed
to be more "convenient" than the material‑object "language";
but when we consult the awesome difficulties involved with the sense data approach,
e.g. in G. E. Moore (1873‑1958), [87]
and when we see Ayer continue to show how much human thought must be narrowed
and limited by it, it is no surprise that sense‑datum theorists are still
squirming about like Laocoön, trying to extricate themselves from self‑imposed
restrictions. Our own Laocoön, Ayer, states in fine positivist fashion:

To the question, What are
the causes of sense‑data in general? there can indeed be no significant
answer. [How often do we get a "significant answer" on anything
from a positivist?] For it does not make sense to postulate a cause of phenomena
as a whole. [Why not the physical world?] But it is always permissible to
attempt to correlate any given sense·datum . . . with another. [88]

For Ayer it could not be substantial
material events that would give rise to our perceptions, since the "unity"
and "substantiality" of material things need only be explained by
reference to certain patterns of sense data. [89]
Thus Berkeley's idealism has not been transcended by Ayer, despite his earlier
refutation of certain of Berkeley's arguments designed to prove esse is percipi.
Ayer's thought supplements Berkeley by Bertrand Russell's theory that material
things are logical constructions out of perceived sensa. [90]
These "logical constructions" often reflect reality, Ayer neglects
to mention, as verified by practice. Ayer neglects to mention this because
of his contemplative approach to science and life. [91]
In fact, Ayer shows his own empiricist ignorance of theory and practice
in science when he states: "I have chosen my examples from the sense
of sight because, as I have already pointed out, it is, for those who are able
to obtain them, the visual data that play the predominant rôle in the
construction of the material world." [92]

Ayer, near the end of his book,
skirts practice when he states, that we are on the way towards identifying veridical
perceptions—he cannot think of actually identifying a reality beyond and indicated
by the appearances, since then Ayer would be forced into materialism—when further
sense‑experiences can be given predictive value. [93]
But scientists must do more than gaze at appearances so their predictions might
have veridicity, and their predictions look for more than "correlations".
Opposed to such phenomenalistic reductions of scientific statements, Willard
Van Orman Quine (b. 1908) states: "The totality of our so‑called
knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history
to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic,
is a man‑made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges.”
[94] Thus, instead of Quine falling into
positivistic idealism, he falls into pragmatistic idealism. Quine rejects Ayer's
attempt to define theoretical principles and real events by means of primitive
sense data, but Quine falls into the same conventionalistic trap as Ayer when
Quine asserts: "Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation
as convenient intermediaries—not by definition in terms of experience, but simply
as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer."
[95] Then Quine descends to irrationalism
and relativistic sociologism:

. . . In point of epistemological
footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in
kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits.
The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that
it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a
manageable structure into the flux of experience. [96]

The ideological consciousness of the bourgeois philosopher,
then, is used to giving out myths and seeing everything as ultimately a lie,
given the present position of the ruling bourgeoisie. Capitalist ideologies
must invent devices for throwing up a "manageable structure" over
an apparently chaotic mass of fragments and anarchy in the bourgeois world.
This is quite different from the revolutionary bourgeois thinkers, who strove
to fight against and dispel myths and lies instead of dealing with physical
and social reality, the bourgeois now falls back on "cultural posits",
i.e. conventional bourgeois "wisdom". Thus, like Ayer, Quine sees
scientific concepts as "expediting", [97]
“managing" our sense experiences, but Quine goes further, seeing science
as "myth‑making". British positivist sobriety can brook only
"logical construction"; it takes American pragmatic drunkenness to
move onto the next anti‑Praxis rung of the ladder, onto conceiving
scientific notions as mythical. At any rate, once again, the bourgeois
philosopher separates us from reality, screening it from our comprehension by
pragmatic myths. But this pragmatic American myth‑making is not as irrational
as may seem, it can not hold a candle to an even more irrational set of pure
French madness, petty bourgeois negativism: the existentialist phenomenalistic,
constitutive, negativistic ontological idealism of Jean‑Paul Sartre (1905‑1980).

Returning to the more sober
idealism of A. J. Ayer, his book, The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge,ends with a phenomenalistic whimper rather than a materialistic bang, when
he asserts:

The most that we can do is
to elaborate a technique for predicting the course of our sensory experience,
and to adhere to it so long as it is found to be reliable. And this is all
that is essentially involved in our belief in the reality of the physical
world. [98]

Thus, Ayer cannot but adopt
the perspective of the ideology of the ruling, non‑productive classes;
he contemplates, views, supervises, "experiences" from his concrete
domination of others who actually produce. Ayer is not involved in actually
making what he could then "experience"; the physical world
as a concept thus seems a superfluous, "inconvenient" one for him.
But phenomenalism does not require that its exponents adopt a passive orientation
to reality; given the appropriate conditions, phenomenalism can declare that
the mind creates its experiences, or at least the structures of
those experiences, as we shall see in Sartre.

The Second World War was not
yet over, France was in the grips of the horrendous Nazi occupation, and Sartre
published his Being and Nothingness (1943), writing it in a café
under the eyes of the Nazis. And though Sartre stressed human freedom in
his book (L'Être et le néant), this human freedom could
only be posited within an absurd world drama and in desperate opposition to
social science, declared to be founded on "self‑deception".

While Marxist philosophers helped
to organize the Resistance against the Nazis, analyzing Nazism as a product
of the objective, irreconcilable contradictions of capitalism in continental
Europe, analyzing the situation without falling, by any means, into irrationalism;
Sartre, representing the anti‑Nazi French bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie,
read the irrational situation of their society as a product of the general situation
of an irrational life. As Auguste Cornu masterfully characterizes Sartre's position
on this absurdity: —"Sartre's absolute subjectivism condemns man to an
absurd existence, and reduces the subject to a tortured consciousness, in despair
because of its pursuit of a goal which remains inaccessible to it, and making
the wretchedness of consciousness the very essence of existence; existence thereby
has the character of a pointless drama." [99]

Existentialism had arisen, in
this century, in the Germany of the 1920's with Heidegger, in which country,
as Cornu notes, the depression and crisis had ruined the petty bourgeoisie.
The philosophy of Existentialism had its vogue in France after World War II,
in the late 1940's and early 1950's. Cornu correctly sees in French Existentialism
the outlook of the isolated individual, lost in a decaying capitalist civilization,
an outlook in which the individual rejects the bourgeois world and seeks transcendence
of that world in this very bourgeois isolation and subjectivity, [100]
making a heroic virtue out of a degrading (apparent) necessity. Cornu makes
an insightful observation about the originality of this early Sartrean system
when he says: "Thus he combines . . . all the characteristic traits of
the ideology of decadent classes, an ideology marked by an egocentrism expressed
either in an escape from reality by way of dream, renunciation, or death, or
in a utopian voluntarism which tends arbitrarily to impose its rules on the
world.” [101]

Sartre begins his Being and
Nothingness by setting forth the phenomenalist problematic. "Modern
thought has realized considerable progress by reducing the existent to the series
of appearances (apparitions) which manifest it.” [102]
As in pragmatism, phenomenology, and positivism—despite the occasional bourgeois
philosophic exceptions to the phenomenalist tendencySartre rejects the
appearance/reality distinction. Rejecting this distinction at a time when it
was never more sorely needed, viz. during the Nazi occupation of France, Sartre
glories in continuing the same bourgeois thought which figures as part of the
reason why so many had been fooled and manipulated by the appearances of capitalism
and bourgeois life. As Sartre nonetheless heedlessly states:

There is no longer an exterior
for the existent if one means by that a superficial covering which bides from
sight the true nature of the object. . . . . The appearances which manifest
the existent are neither interior nor exterior; they are all equal, they all
refer to other appearances . . . [103]

Sartre, despite superficial
appearances of following in the wake of phenomenalists such as Peirce, James,
and the logical positivists, however, wants to make sure that we know just which
phenomenalists he is following. He doesn't leave us in suspense: he is following
the "phenomenology" of Husserl and Martin Heidegger (1889‑1976).
[104] One can see the eclectic combination
of these two "phenomenologies" in Sartre's consciousness when we see
Sartre combine the essence‑seeking‑pursuit of Husserl with the irrational
grounding of Heidegger's existentialist method of using morbid emotions to get
to these essences. As Sartre explains: "Being will be disclosed to us by
some kind of immediate access—boredom, nausea, etc., and ontology will be the
description of the phenomenon of being as it manifests itself; that is, without
intermediary.” [105] As Husserl's own
interpretation of "positivism" is qualitatively different from "mundane"
positivism, [106] Sartre's "phenomenalism"
is quite different from earlier monistic phenomenalism.

Our own consciousness, Sartre
tells us, has no other deeper reality activating it either; it, too, is but
its appearance. But Sartre adds a Heideggerian element to his own phenomenalism
by totally emptying consciousness and transforming it into a Nothingness:

Consciousness has nothing
substantial, it is pure "appearance" ("apparence")
in the sense that it exists only to the degree to which it appears. But
it is precisely because consciousness is pure appearance, because it is total
emptiness" [107] (since the entire
world is outside it)—it is because of this identity of appearance and existence
within it that it can be considered as . . . absolute (l'absolu). [108]

As Cornu explains Sartre's own
anti‑empirical and pseudo‑theoretical phenomenalism:

Sartre pushed phenomenalism
to its extreme, thereby giving ideological expression to the aggravation of
the capitalist system's decomposition. It is not enough for him to deny all
substantive reality to the external world; he finds the Ego itself has an
essentially phenomenal character, and deprives it of all substance, reducing
it thus not to the inner Ego, as Bergson did, but to Nothingness. [109]

But Sartre cannot follow the
other phenomenalists in reducing the series of phenomenal appearances to the
subject's, to consciousness' series of appearances (partly because he never
outgrew religious and Cartesian dualisms). Sartre wishes to preserve the existence
of being outside,really outside (totally separate from) of consciousness
(which is Nothingness, void). Consciousness thus entails a Being other than
itself. [110]

This Being in itself (what materialists
would call Nature) is the (non·interpenetrating, for Sartre) opposite
of Being for itself (consciousness). In order to postulate a theory about the
essence of Being in itself, Sartre reverses Spinoza's statement "Omnis
determinatio est negatio", all determination is negation, by stating
that all negation is determination, that negation is the foundation of the structure
of Being in itself. Negation is only a category of Nothingness, of human existence,
however; thus Being is prior to the negativating activity of Nothingness and
has no nothingness in ityet Being gives Nothingness something to project
its negativities onto. Sartre's existentialism then, more firmly anchors itself
in the pseudo‑phenomenology of the Nazi Heidegger than in the phenomenology
of Husserl, victim of Nazism and Heidegger. [111]
But Sartre's phenomenalistic dualism, contradictory in itself, makes the object
to be inactive. This is nothing new. Max Stirner (1806‑1856) assigned
the qualities of things to acts of the Ego; in Arthur Schopenhauer (1788‑1860)
reality was postulated as absurd; and from Friedrich Nietzsche (1844‑1900)
Sartre derived his notion of the essence of the individual as a will to power.
Coming back to his main roots in phenomenology, Sartre explains, despite his
reservations about the fruitfulness of Heidegger's own Nicht: "Nothingness
(le néant) can be nothingness only by nihilating itself expressly
as nothingness of the world; that is, in its nihilation (néantisation)
it must direct itself expressly toward this world in order to constitute
itself as refusal of the world (refus du monde)." [112]

"Nothingness lies coiled
in the heart of being—like a worm. [113]
Sartre thus continues Heidegger's "much ado about nothing", and Sartre
turns the structures of being into little nothings—he robs Being of structure,
turns it into a blob, and makes the irrationalization of the world, à
la Heidegger, more complete. Sartre also carries on the idealist struggle against
materialistic determinism by making human decisions totally free (due to the
void or nothingness of Being for itself, i.e. consciousness).

But why all this? Why must bourgeois
philosophers not only deny the appearance/reality dialectic, but negate the
world's rationality, and rob it of structure? Why all this talk about the worm
at the heart of being? Why must the human being's consciousness be totally emptied?

Certainly none of this metaphysic
gone mad can be deduced from phenomenalism (nor from the usual idealism) per
se, otherwise Ayer might well have deduced some of it from his. Cornu's explanation
is illuminating in this connection: since Sartre "speaks for a class which
has lost its reason for existence, he deprives both the world and the Ego of
all substantive reality; thus he makes Nothingness the basic relation of man
with himself and with the world, and reduces the will to power to a freedom
of choice without reason and without goal, to a useless activity in an absurd
world.” [114]

The "useless activity"
spoken of by Cornu in Sartre's thought stems from Sartre's borrowing from Nietzsche
(at least in part), that the basic will to power means "striving to become
God". [115] In Sartrean terms this
is to unite the un‑unitable, viz. Being (fullness) and Nothingness (void),
[116] and thus, as Sartre states with
existentialist "heroism": "Human reality therefore is by nature
an unhappy consciousness with no possibility of surpassing its unhappy state.”
[117]

William James' phenomenalism
was largely optimistic and opportunistic, reflecting the outset of Imperialism;
nevertheless it wound up in irrationalism. Edmund Husserl's "phenomenalism"
was a phenomenalism of a higher level than all the others, irrational precisely
because of its unearthly and one‑sided notion of reason; it reflected
the feudalistic remnants of the German ruling class which had to turn away from
the developing reality or to deal with reality in an unreal fashion. Certainty
could only be found by looking to an unchanging realm, and thus phenomenology
à la Husserl was itself irrational and led to the even greater irrationality
of Heidegger's existentialism ("philosophy of Being", as he wanted
it called). Husserl's higher level, transcendental phenomenalism, was brought
into serious question by World War I and the unrelenting crises of Weimar Germany.
The irrationality of the capitalist world required even Husserl's most recent
faithful followers to mix heavy doses of the existentialism Husserl despised
with his "phenomenology", thereby destroying the "Reinheit"
of Husserl's decadent Neo­Kantian scholasticism. A. J. Ayer's phenomenalism
and anti‑materialism continued the poverty‑stricken British empiricism
which had its roots in the active hegemony of capitalist relationships and bourgeois
thought in England, and Ayer carried this empiricistic phenomenalism close to
the dawn of an even more bankrupt stage of British bourgeois philosophy: linguistic
"analysis". Ayer's positivism strives to strip away ontology from
philosophy, to show a conventionalist, fictional alternative to materialism,
and to keep philosophy from interacting with practice. Thus Ayer's philosophy
also winds up in a self‑contradictory sensationalist metaphysics, in a
conventionalistic irrationalisrn, and in an empiricistic Oxfordian scholasticism,
an irrationalism manifesting itself as a fetishism of the process of
analysis, a pure contemplation of the world like Husserl's (and unlike the irrational
activisms of James and Sartre). Ayer's analysis of the nature of science winds
up similarly to Sartre's, namely, scientific theories become fictions, mere
constructions, though Sartre's thought takes this seriously philosophically
and shows science the door. Ayer baths in Russellian skepticism and adds his
own positivist arrogance and haughtiness, whereas Sartre bases his philosophy,
negatively, on a world without God, where religion is no longer a consolation
for the irrationality of capitalism, and irrationality itself formally negates,
in a bourgeois way, that bourgeois negation. As Auguste Cornu sums up Sartre's
outlook of Being and Nothingness, [118]
showing how Sartre deepened French bourgeois irrationalism after Bergson still
further, in accordance with the new stage of bourgeois society and its idealist
philosophy:

Contemporary French idealist
philosophy, whose essential representatives are, first Bergsonianism, and
then existentialism, is the ideology of the bourgeoisie, which was revolutionary
during the rise of the class and conservative during its dominance, becomes
reactionary during the phase of decadence, a phase marked by the disintegration
of the capitalist system, more and more deeply undermined by economic and
social contradictions. Bourgeois ideology no longer tends to change or to
justify the real, but to escape from it. [119]

Cornu's analysis of Sartre's
early thought, incidentally, gives the answer to the mystery the existentialist
Maurice Merleau‑Ponty (1908‑1961) discerned. As Merleau‑Ponty
stated: "Philosophy no longer has the power of exhaustive comprehension
which Hegel gave it." [120] Even
Sartre himself, later, tried to escape the bankruptcy of bourgeois thought by
"adopting" Marxism with an Existentalist base. As Sartre asserted:
". . . I consider Marxism the one philosophy of our time which we cannot
go beyond and because I hold the ideology of existence and its 'comprehensive'
method to be an enclave inside Marxism. . . . ." [121]
And as Sartre continues:

. . . An "anti‑Marxist"
argument is only the apparent rejuvenation of a pre‑Marxist idea.
A so‑called "going beyond" Marxism will be at worst only a
return to pre·Marxism; at best, only the rediscovery of a thought already
contained in the philosophy which one believes he has gone beyond. [122]

Sartre's identification with
anti‑imperialist Third World movements and his attempts to recover from
the eclipse of Existentialism in the late 1950's (the eclipse being due both
to the rise of a philosophy antithetical to existentialism, viz. Structuralism,
which replaced it as the most important bourgeois philosophical movement in
France, and to the unremitting and withering criticisms of French Marxists and
above all, perhaps, Lukács' telling critique of Sartre) brought him to
appear to adopt Marxism, and to adapt the Marxist concepts of
the unity of theory and practice to his own radical bourgeois purposes. As Sartre
said, for example:

Every philosophy is practical,
even the one which at first appears tobe the most contemplative.
Its method is a social and political weapon [nota bene]. [123]

Unfortunately, Sartre actually
used the weapon of his "Marxism" quite often against the proletarian
nations and against the Party of the workers in France, [124]
going over at last to the isolated French ultra‑left and Maoism. Despite
all the various attempts at phenomenalism, in practice, in reality, even
the phenomenalists themselves implicitly accept and utilize the dialectics of
appearance /reality (e.g. Sartre above—"every philosophy is practical,
even the one which at first appears to be the most contemplative"). The
appearance/essence distinction is indispensable to both scientific theory and
revolutionary practice; therefore, phenomenalism cannot maintain its philosophic
rationality. Phenomenalism is one of the facets of decay connected with the
basically idealist nature of bourgeois philosophy during the period of
the decline and inherent precariousness of the ruling class of capitalist society.
The bourgeois literary representatives of this class are not paid to ponder
the reality behind the appearances, but to manage the appearances, to
use a thought from the reactionary Pragmatist Quine.

As Sartre says of Nature (Being
in itself), in contrast to the old idealist, religious concept: "Uncreated,
without reason for being, without any connection with another being, being‑in‑itself
(l’être‑en‑soi) is de trop [superfluous] for
eternity. [125] It is not Nature which
is de trop for eternity, but it is reactionary bourgeois thought which
is now superfluous for those who adopt the perspective of the future, those
who see the reality beneath the apparent chaos of today's world.

8. As Marx
explains: "Capital . . . is not only, as Adam Smith says, the command over
labour. It is essentially the command over unpaid labour. All surplus‑value,
whatever particular from (profit, interest, or rent), it may subsequently crystallize
into, is in substance the materialisation of unpaid labour. The secret of the
self·expansion of capital resolves itself into having the disposal of
a definite quantity of other people's unpaid labour." Marx, Capital,
I, p. 534. And further, Marx gives his labor‑power theory of Value:
"A commodity represents, say 6 working·hours. If an invention is
made by which it can be produced in 3 hours, the value, even of the commodity
already produced, falls by half. It represents now 3 hours of social labour
instead of the 6 formerly necessary. It is the quantity of labour required for
its production, not the realised form of that labour, by which the amount of
the value of a commodity is determined." Ibid., I, pp. 536‑537.
[> main text]

11. Ibid.,
I. p.537. Translation corrected. As Marx continues, connecting the concentration
on appearances by bourgeois economists and practical capitalists to the
reality of the unfolding of capitalist society: "Hence, we may understand
the decisive importance of the transformation of value and price of labour‑power
into the form of wages, or into the value and price of labour itself. This phenomenal
form, which makes the actual relation invisible, and, indeed, shows the direct
opposite of that relation, forms the basis of all the juridical notions of both
labourer and capitalist, of all the mystifications of the capitalistic mode
of production, of all its illusions as to liberty, of all the apologetic shifts
of the vulgar economists." Capital, I, p.540. [>
main text]

13. As Einstein
said on the topic of positivism, very aptly (but perhaps too loosely); "I
believe that every true theorist is a kind of tamed metaphysicist, no matter
how pure a 'positivist' he may fancy himself." Albert Einstein, "On
the Generalized Theory of Gravitation", 1950, p. 342. In Albert Einstein,
Ideas and Opinions (New York: Crown, 1959). [> main
text]

14. My translation.
Cf. Kirk, op.cit., p. 227. Kirk correctly perceives that Heraclitus
is not thereby falling into the Kantian obscurantism of the incomprehensible
Ding an sich: "It is important to notice that Heraclitus does not
say that the constitution of things is unknowable, only that it is hidden
. . . .” Ibid., p. 231. Kirk's italics. [> main
text]

15. Einstein,
"Principles of Theoretical Physics", p. 221. In Einstein, Ideas
and Opinions. As Einstein further explained twenty years later: "The
theoretical scientist is compelled in an increasing degree to be guided by purely
mathematical, formal considerations in his search for a theory, because the
physical experience of the experimenter cannot lead him up to the regions of
highest abstraction." Einstein, "The Problem of Space, Ether and the
Field in Physics", 1934, p. 282. [> main text]

30. Hegel,
Science of Logic, p. 121. As Hegel states with great acuity elsewhere
of Kant's "thing in itself": "If to know means to comprehend
an object in its concrete character, then the thing‑in‑itself, which
is nothing but the quite abstract and indeterminate thing in general, must certainly
be as unknowable as it is alleged to be. With as much reason however as we speak
of the thing‑by‑itself, we might speak of quality‑by‑itself
or quantity‑by‑itself, and of any other category." Encyclopaedia
Logic, §124, pp. 231‑232. [> main text]

35. "Everything
is inherently contradictory, and . . . this law in contrast to the others
[i.e. formal logical laws] expresses rather the truth and the essential nature
of things." Hegel, Science of Logic, p. 439. Hegel's italics. As
Hegel observes: "it must be regarded as a step of infinite importance that
dialectic is once more recognized as necessary to reason, although the result
to be drawn from it must be the opposite of that arrived at by Kant." Ibid.,
p. 831. [> main text]

41. Ibid.,
p. 588. Translation changed. Hegel's italics. Despite its dialectical genius,
Hegel's philosophy is permeated with undialectical mystification. As Hegel asserts:
"Every philosophy is essentially an idealism or at least has idealism for
its principle, and the question then is only how far this principle is actually
carried out." Ibid., pp. 154‑155. [> main
text]

42. William
James, "A World of Pure Experience", p. 152. In Paul Kurtz, ed., American
Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1966). [>
main text]

50. As James
explains: "Material substance was criticised by Berkeley with such
telling effect that his name has reverberated through all subsequent philosophy.
. . . . So far from denying the external world which we know, Berkeley corroborated
it. It was the scholastic notion of a material substance unapproachable by us,
behind the external world, deeper and more real than it, and needed to
support it, which Berkeley maintained to be the most effective of all reducers
of the external world to unreality. Abolish that substance, he said, believe
that God, whom you can understand and approach, sends you the sensible world
directly, and you confirm the latter and back it up by his divine authority.
Berkeley's criticism of 'matter' was consequently absolutely pragmatistic."
Pragmatism, pp. 67‑68. James' italics. [> main
text]

54. Husserl
appreciated William James' The Principles of Psychology (2 vols., 1890),
and he made use of James' "stream of consciousness" metaphor, but
Husserl's idealism returns to the thick spiritual consciousness of ghostly Renaissance
(Cartesian) and Medieval (Scholastic, filtered through Brentano) times whereas
James' consciousness is closer to naturalism and organic functioning, though
James also cannot at the same time resist the thicker more pre‑scientific
fakeries of the Spiritualism usually rampant in America. James' metaphysics
of "pure experience" and Husserl's "Transcendental Ego"
and the stream of its experiences are both idealistic constructs, but James
is here trying to transcend both materialism and idealism, another illusion
of bourgeois philosophy in the age of imperialism. [> main
text]

55. Husserl, Ideas, §49, p. 151.
Husserl's italics. As Husserl also declares: "Thus no real thing, none
that consciously presents and manifests itself through appearances, is necessary
for the Being of consciousness itself (in the widest sense of the stream
of experience)." Ideas, §49, p. 152. Husserl's italics. [>
main text]

65. As Husserl
insists: ". . whatever presents itself in 'intuition' in originary form
(as it were in its bodily reality), is simply to be accepted as it gives
itself out to be . . . ." Ideas, §24, p. 92. Italics Husserl's. Translation
slightly emended. [> main text]

72. Cf. A.
J. Ayer, "Philosophy and Politics", 1965. In A. J. Ayer, Metaphysics
and Common Sense (San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper, 1970). Ayer's politics
can be seen to be a liberal litany of the status quo. As Ayer explains his position:
". . . I have nothing new to offer. Only the old familiar liberal principles.
. . . Representative government, universal suffrage, freedom of speech, freedom
of the press, the right of collective bargaining, equality before the law, and
all that goes with the so‑called welfare state. . . . . It would be more
romantic to be marching forward shoulder to shoulder under some bright new banner
towards a brave new world. But I don't know: perhaps it is the effect of age.
. . . . For me the problem is not to devise a new set of political principles
but rather to find a more effective means of putting into operation the principles
that most of us already profess to have." Ibid., pp. 259‑260.
The causes of Ayer's view are not to be found in his own superannuation, but
that of British capitalism, that there is no "bright new banner" for
the bourgeoisie and its representatives. [> main text]

81. Ibid.
Ayer wishes to avoid Rudolf Carnap's formalistic conventionalism
(and also Carnap's coherence theory of truth in regard to "protocol sentences"),
and Ayer says very amusingly: "We should think a philosopher very silly
who maintained that all problems about nutrition were purely verbal, on the
ground that they could be reformulated as questions about the words that occurred
in nutrition‑sentences. But his argument would be exactly on a level with
that which Carnap uses to dispose of the 'problems of the so‑called given'."
Ayer, The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, p. 114. Ayer does not want
to give up his own British empiricistic idealism for Carnap's Austrian formalistic
idealism. Ayer's uneaten banana is an object of the possible experience of eating,
while Carnap allows any linguistic conventions about the banana, as long as
those conventions used are consistent. Both, nonetheless, try to avoid any ontological
status for the material banana outside of actual or possible experience.
[> main text]

84. Ayer explains
this notion of "privileged appearances" in terms of certain definite
relationships. Cf. Ayer, The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, p.264f. As he observes: "Thus, the real shape of the material thing might
be defined by a reference to the shape of sense·data that were in a certain
spatial relationship to sense·data belonging to the observer's body;
or its real colour might be defined by a reference to sense‑data that
occurred in sense‑fields displaying a relatively high degree of illumination.
. . . " Ibid., p.266. But Ayer is himself not altogether happy
with the incomplete scope of this approach. [> main
text]

89. Cf. ibid.,
p.232. Ayer also recognizes he may be placing himself in logical jeopardy
here by stating: "It may seem that an attempt to carry out this plan of
'reducing' material things to sense‑data would be at variance with my
previous attempt to draw a sharp distinction between them." Ibid.
[> main text]

90. Cf. Ayer,
The Foundation of Empirical Knowledge, p. 237. As Ayer states in good
Russellian fashion: ". . no finite set of singular statements about sense‑data
can ever formally entail a statement about a material thing, inasmuch as I have
recognized that statements about material things are not conclusively verifiable."
Ibid., p. 239. [> main text]

106.Husserl
states in this connection: "If by 'Positivism' ("Positivismus")we are to mean the absolute unbiased grounding of all science on what is
'positive', i.e. on what can be originarily apprehended, then it is we who
are the genuine positivists." Ideas, §20, p. 86. Italics Husserl's.
Translation slightly altered. [> main text]

113. Ibid.,
p. 21.Sartre continued the undialectical and irrationalist concept of
Heideggerian "freedom", when Sartre states colorfully and foolishly:
"Freedom is the human being putting his past out of play by secreting his
own nothingness." Being and Nothingness, p. 28. [> main
text]

125.Sartre,
Being and Nothingness, p. lxvi.My paper here is printed by permission
of Warren H. Green, publisher. It will appear in vol. 11 of Radical Currents
in Contemporary Philosophy. [> main text]